Metal Fish Eggs

Today’s blog post started out as a comment on What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges. I share Ryan’s general frustration with how Ontario’s colleges are failing to serve either their students or our industry.

I’ve had my share of experiences with the Ontario college system. I taught Flash programming at Centennial College and George Brown and I’ve given workshops at SUNY Buffalo, Red River College and Seneca@York.

As an employer I’ve also hired my share of Flash programmers. And I can assure you competent Flash coders are few and far between. The same could be said for people with a non-superficial understanding of CSS, JS, standards compliance and interface design.

Every year Ontario colleges turn out hundreds of grads. I’ve interviewed many and I’ve reviewed applications for internships from dozens of them. After ten years in this business I’ve hired exactly one graduate of a new media Ontario college system.

So what’s wrong? Let’s review a few of the many ways College’s in Ontario are failing.

Failing to teach students what they need to learn, not what they want to learn.

College programs seem eagre to provide students with programs sound fun and easy. Guess what? Programming is hard. It’s extremely hard.

I can safely say that the courses that made me were the ones that took my smart ass brain and put it through the wringer (that would be second year multi-variable calculus) or took my to a place well outside my comfort zone (that would have to be philosophy). Did I want to take those courses? No. But those were the courses that taught me to work hard and yes – how to deal with failure. I came through them a smarter, more confident and a more mature person.

Struggling through these courses also re-inforced something my dad instilled in me. “Just break it down to first principals” he would say. By which he meant take the problem and strip away the cruft until you get to the crux of it. What I discovered is that, although each discipline has it’s own terminology they are based on similar ideas and problems. Which leads me to…

Failing to teach first principals.

I taught one group of college students who were close to graduation. The lesson was supposed to be about manipulating media in Flash. After a few minutes I realized the students didn’t really understand the difference between vector and bitmap art, RAM vs hard drive storage, or lossless vs lossy compression. I was dumbfounded. I tossed my lesson plan out the window and gave a rapid-fire class in digital media first principals.

The great thing about these basic principals is that they don’t change over time. Learning Flash MX programming was only ever going to be useful to these students for a couple of years. Which leads me to…

Failing to adapt.

For better or for worse colleges don’t do change well. If nothing else, our industry is about keeping up with (and indeed pushing) change. Technologies and tools evolve rapidly. Many college instructors have been working inside that system for many years. I met my share of college instructors struggling to teach software that they had never used professionally and barely had a grasp of. The solution is to bring in more working professionals to teach the specialized skills like Action Script programming and for full-time instructors to focus on first principals and professional standards. Which leads me to…

Failing to teach professional practice.

Our industry is a wonderfully fractured, multi-faceted mess. People bounce from freelancing to small business to big business and back again. Graduates need to understand the fundamentals of doing business. Basic proposal writing, pitching, prototyping, interview skills, strategies for dealing with difficult clients and colleagues, contracting, pricing, getting paid and how not to f*** up your career before it starts.